


Tangled Knots and the Like

by monocrow



Category: Kagerou Project
Genre: Body Dysphoria, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hair Brushing, also my thing for mary's hair, just another practice in casual dialogue ft. kagepro, this was not meant to be angsty but ah well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25621987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monocrow/pseuds/monocrow
Summary: "How the hell do you deal with this on your own?""Um. I usually use detangler," Mary mumbles, tugging on the chunks of her bangs that aren't long enough for him to sweep up. "And a hair brush, not a comb. It hurts when I use one."It's quiet, for a moment, full of Kano's mumbled curses while he yanks about her hair – along with her head – pulling it around like a rag doll. He sighs."This is stupid." There's the plastic clatter of Kano,finally,tossing the comb down beside him. He groans, leaning back onto his palms. "How 'bout we just shave it all off? Or cut it. I could be a great hairstylist, you know."
Relationships: Kano Shuuya/Kozakura Mary
Kudos: 16





	Tangled Knots and the Like

**Author's Note:**

> more kanomary for the soul :^]

"How the hell do you deal with this on your own?" 

Kano sighs and tugs the comb through her hair, uprooting all of the knots and forcing them further down in the tangled mess. She clenches her eyes shut, and tries not to think about all of the hair he's pulling out right now. She hopes she won't wake up bald in the morning.

"Um. I usually use detangler," Mary mumbles, tugging on the chunks of her bangs that aren't long enough for him to sweep up. "And a hair brush, not a comb. It hurts when I use one."

It's quiet, for a moment, full of Kano's mumbled curses while he yanks about her hair – along with her head – pulling it around like a rag doll. He sighs.

"This is stupid." There's the plastic clatter of Kano, _finally,_ tossing the comb down beside him. He groans, leaning back onto his palms. "How 'bout we just shave it all off? Or cut it. I could be a great hairstylist, you know."

"No!" She turns around to face him. He quirks a brow, looking unimpressed. Mary pauses, "I mean," she twirls a lock of a bang around her finger, "I like having it long."

"Come on," he whines, prodding at her, "don't knock it until you've tried it, right?" 

She gathers up armfuls of hair and pulls it out of his grasp; she doesn't trust all of his faux-friendly smiles. At least not since he offered to braid her hair, and then braided it to her headboard instead. There had been many a threat of cutting it all off that night while Kido and Seto worked it all out (Kano had been banished to his room at that point).

"Come on, why don't you trust me?"

"Because you're always lying and pulling pranks."

"Hey," he says, pointing at her with the tip of the comb, "just be thankful that I haven't replaced your shampoo with hair dye."

She presses her lips, biting the spot inside where they meet – it's scarred over and raw from all of the excessive worrying over the years. "You don't have to help. I can just wait for someone else to get back." She rocks on her knees to stand.

"Hey, wait!" He grabs her wrist – his fingers fit perfectly around it, meeting each other at the ends. It's restricting. "I have to. Kido's gonna kill me if I don't." She runs her eyes over him, and he looks surprisingly honest, at least, as much as he can be. There's none of the warm molten red in his eyes, the tell of his ability. But then again, she could just be missing it in the dull light – fluorescents always give her headaches, leaving her room filled with lamps and shades that don't match.

Kido probably would kill him, since she's prone to try it whenever Kano doesn't do something she tells him to.

"Alright," she sighs, sinking back down. "You should get a proper brush, though. And detangler."

"Yeah, yeah," he sighs and stands, stretching. There are little pops all throughout his shoulder and back. "Is it normally this bad?" He pauses when he shifts over to her vanity. "Your hair, I mean."

"No, it's because of the chlorine from the pool."

"Is that why Kido was helping you out last time we went?" He's digging around her drawers while he talks, pulling out the little cute perfume bottles she's collected, and all the frilly hair ties with the crinkly fabric. It sends a little spike of fear down her spine – there's nothing bad in there, so it shouldn't be so nerve racking.

"Um, yeah," she manages, mumbling it into her palm. He pulls aside the bobby-pins that she's painted all different colors – it's so they match all of her outfits. He finds what he's looking for and shoves the pins back in – it shouldn't have been so hard to find the brush, she thinks, it was right in the top of the drawer – and he plops back down in front of her, crossing his legs.

"Turn around," he says, rolling the brush in a circle. She does, shuffling around on the carpet to get a better angle. He grabs a chunk of hair and pauses, pinching it.

"You should start from the bottom," she says.

"Huh?"

"The bottom, if you can. That way you won't be just pushing the knots further down."

Kano hums, trailing his hands down through her hair – still ridiculously soft, even with all of the biting chemicals they use in pools – until he reaches where it's the thinnest, pooling around the floor in ringlets. He plays with the end, letting split-ends flutter against the pads of his fingers. It feels nice, like it always does, even when her hair is dried together.

He forgot to grab the detangler, he realizes.

"Why didn't you just take a shower first?" He sticks the bristles in an inch or so up and pulls down – there's not as much resistance as before, or the plasticky snapping of broken strands.

"It just gets more tangled. I usually wait until I brush it all out before I shower," she says. It's hard to hear, from behind her, given how soft she speaks as is. It's kind of annoying, always having to pick apart what she says five times over. 

But it is kind of endearing, in a weird way. 

Still annoying though.

He sighs.

"Is something wrong?" She asks. It's hesitant, with her high, whispery voice.

He huffs and tugs the brush down. "It's just that," he pulls it out of her hair and swings it to the side while he talks, "you're so quiet. It's hard to understand what you're saying."

"Um!" she squeaks, tensing under his fingers, "sorry..." it's even quieter than she normally is.

"No, you're getting quieter!"

"Sorry!" She mumbles more than she squeaks, and this time it's barely above a whisper. 

Kano rolls his eyes and ignores her – he never gets anywhere with her (not that it isn't his own fault, being untrustworthy and all that) – and focuses back on her hair instead, sifting through it with cutdown nails. He pulls the brush through it again, working out particularly tough knots with his fingers and traveling up her spine. 

It feels strangely hypnotic, a tedium that's almost relaxing more than it is dull.

It's nice.

"Maybe I should grow my hair out," he says, and it's more of a freudian slip than an attempt at conversation.

Mary hums beneath him – a weird, soft vibration that he can feel through the thin layer of fabric between them. "Couldn't you do that with your ability?"

"It's not the same," he says, quickly running through a tough knot that makes her yelp, "it wouldn't actually be there. I'm still physically the same, even if I don't look like it."

"Oh," she mumbles. "You could at least do it with your ability to see if you like it."

He pauses in his brushing, before sighing and placing the brush itself next to him, leaning back. Mary turns around to look at him. She looks like she wants to ask him something.

He ignores her.

Changing his appearance for the first time, without a solid picture in mind is always hard, like grasping around in the dark. It's easier to think of Kido and her green hair, or a cat with black fur and yellowing eyes – they're images that he knows like the back of his hand, and he doesn't need a mirror to know that he's perfected them.

He thinks of his hair, a ratty and deep blond with a natural wave to it that always tangles. He thinks of his hair but long, dripping in curls and ringlets. He thinks of where it might fall just above the line of his waist, where the hem of his shirt lays, and then he lights his eyes up with red.

Mary blinks at him, then lets out a surprised gasp, then breaks out in a smile. It's a bit childish.

"It looks really pretty, Kano!" She says, all warm smiles and soft edges. It makes him feel uncomfortable, so he makes sure there's enough red to cover up the feeling with a goofy smile, one that's only plastered over his real face like a thick layer paint.

"You know, most guys don't like to be told they're pretty," he snorts, leaning back again, makes sure it's full of ease that isn't there – there's something that feels uncomfortably intimate about this that he doesn't like, but shutting everything down now would just be suspicious.

"Oh," she pauses, crinkles a brow. "You look handsome?"

He can't help the laugh that bubbles up. "Thanks?" He mimics.

Mary flushes. "Don't laugh." She huffs, settling back down and running her eyes over him in a way that feels almost perverse. "You do look nice, though."

He winks and flicks back the phantom hair around his neck – if he thinks about it hard enough, it almost feels like it's there, slipping against his skin and tickling his nape.

"I feel like your hair is fluffier, though," she muses, boring her eyes where it falls over his shoulders. She leans forward a bit, like she's debating on reaching out to it, but she decides against it, falling back into place.

"You think?" He grabs an airy lock loosely and pulls it to the side, letting it fall apart in chunks. Mary nods. 

He stands to look in her vanity, moving his head side to side to get better angles. He knows he's never been the most masculine guy, but it still doesn't look right on him. Too broad of shoulders, eyes too sharp. The illusion dissipates, and he falls back into himself, short hair, messily cut bangs that he keeps feeding into for a fleeting sense of familiarity.

"Oh. Did you not like it?" Mary asks, looking up to him. He runs a hand through his hair – real, tangible – and sits back down. 

"It looked girly," he shrugs.

There's nothing _wrong_ with girly, though, and just having long hair doesn't make something girly. He didn't mind the skirts he had to pretend to wear in Ayano's stead, just the people he had to interact with. He didn't mind when Momo filled his hair with barrettes and sparkly hair ties, just that they pulled on his roots.

He didn't mind, and _yet._

He knows that wasn't him looking back in the mirror. There was just enough wrong with it that it felt distorted, like a spot the difference game full of dread that creeps up on you the longer you look without being able to pinpoint all the minor inconsistencies.

It's easy to look in the mirror as someone else, to see himself as a nameless, faceless background character in his life. It's easy to look at himself as Kido or Seto or even _Ayano,_ because he knows that's not him, it's someone else that he dresses himself up as, bathed in a gross, overwhelming red.

Sometimes it is hard, though, looking at himself. He doesn't recognize the perfect skin that he wraps around himself like tape, constricting and suffocating. Whenever he digs up enough courage – completely pathetically, because it's a kind of courage that he shouldn't _need_ to dig up – to show himself the ugly and mangled scars covering his skin. Some from him, some from his mother. His body just feels even more so foreign, fake and wrong and so very _not him._

It's the repeated question of _who am I?_ Always a painful dig at the back of his mind, one that just claws its way up whenever he tries to push it down, leaving behind more gaping and oozing scars that he has to cover up again.

He tugs his shoulders into a shrug, bored. Casual, casual, casual. 

Mary looks confused, like she knows something is wrong but she doesn't know how to broach the problem itself. Kano never thought that he'd be grateful for her overall obliviousness, but here he is.

She rolls a contemplative lip between her teeth. "I think it would be nice if you grew your hair out," she says slowly, like she's talking to an easily spooked animal. It's a bit demeaning. "I don't really have anyone to do hair things with around, besides Momo. She's not here very often, though, so..."

He reaches behind himself and knots his fingers in the hair that tickles the nape of his neck, trying not to pull too hard. 

_What if he did grow his hair out_ – it's a stupid thought to put so much consideration into.

"So you just want a doll to play with, huh," he teases, shoving down all of the pointless introspection, because now really isn't the time to be doing self-reflection. "Just get a mannequin, or one of those creepy life sized Barbies. And turn around if you want me to keep brushing your hair."

Mary listens – looking a bit put out – shifting around on her knees. "What do you mean, life sized Barbies?" She asks after a brief readjustment.

He pauses. "You don't know what a Barbie is?"

She shakes her head.

"Wow! You really live under a rock, don't you?"

"No! I don't!" She wiggles around in his grasp, just to make his job harder, probably. "I lived in the forest for over a hundred years... you can't expect me to know everything!"

He hums placatingly. "Of course, whatever you say."

She huffs, but doesn't bristle up anymore, just settles and let's him work his fingers back against her scalp. He tries to ease back into the soft, mindless tedium from before, making his movements as rhythmic as possible. There's a lingering intensity that's still knotted in his muscles. He doesn't put much thought into it, because it's always there whenever he gets too close too revealing something a bit too personal about himself – which is just getting to be more and more things these days.

If Mary notices the little braids he works into her hair, she doesn't say anything and just lets him, smoothing them back out before doing it all over again – it's weird that the prospect of her being not quite as oblivious as he thought doesn't scare him as much as he might have thought.

His arms feel a bit like jelly by the time he deems himself done. His muscles are too tired to be tense and twitchy, and Mary's hair looks like it belongs in an art museum with a spotlight on it – ignoring the distinct smell of pool chlorine, that is. 

He's a bit proud.

He feels hesitant, putting the brush down to his side, and leaning back. Mary fidgets, and— oh, she's waiting for him to tell her that he's done. Under normal circumstances he would have teased her, something about _obedience_ or other, but it doesn't feel all that normal. Something seems weirdly, casually intimate about the gesture, and it makes him feel a bit sick.

"I'm done," he says with a smile, because even if she can't see the smile, he knows that you can hear it in someone's voice.

"Thank you," she says, turning back around to face him for the nth time that night.

It's awkward. It was easier to talk when he was facing her back, and he had something to busy himself with. Now it's just the two of them, sitting across from each other on the floor of her bedroom.

Kano tosses the brush at Mary, and their weird staring contest is broken while he stands and listens to his joints pop – isn't that something only old people's bodies are supposed to do? She flounders around for the brush while he stretches; it's a bit unnecessarily satisfying, watching her.

"Go take a shower."

"What...?"

"You said you take a shower after this, right?" He waves, opening her bedroom door. "Then go do that."

"Oh, um," she stares at the brush for a minute, like it's suddenly turned into a pop quiz. "Okay."

He steps into the hallway and swings the door shut behind him, trying to ignore the lump in his throat.


End file.
